Posts tagged with "Perkins Eastman":

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Completed in November 2017, the Perkins Eastman–designed School of Nursing and Science Building occupies a former parking lot in downtown Camden, establishing a new institutional heart for Rutgers University in the slowly reviving city. The design inhabits a formidable full-block mass, reaching a height of four stories with a multidimensional facade of high-performance concrete and glass curtainwall shaded by perforated panels.

Similar to other urban centers across the Rust Belt, Camden has undergone a significant period of economic stagnation and demographic decline since the mid-20th century. However, the continued expansion of healthcare institutions, such as the Nursing and Science Building, is fundamentally reshaping the city’s character.
The project is located on a triangular site adjacent to Camden City Hall, and the residential neighborhood of Lanning Square. Owing to the irregularity of the site, each elevation of the 101,000-square-foot project is a different length. Rather than attempting to establish conformity across the Nursing and Science Building, Perkins Eastman’s design plays with each facade's unique dimensions. The southwest elevation features a hollowed-out frame filled by a three-story glass facade, while the northeast elevation recalls the more traditional masonry punched window style found around the area.
For the rainscreen, Perkins Eastman turned to TAKTL, a design and manufacturing operation located in the Greater Pittsburgh Region, to produce rectangular high-performance concrete panels. To blend in with the prevailing use of stone ashlar and brick for historic buildings in downtown Camden, the concrete panels are colored reddish-brown and finished to resemble non-glazed terra-cotta. The panels, measuring one-by-three feet, are face-fastened with color-matched screws to the light-gauge structural steel stud framing.
While the rainscreen serves as an oversized framing device, the bulk of the 110,000-square-foot project resides behind glass curtain wall. Sections of the curtain wall bulge from the assembly, providing room for a variety of functions within.
“The facade is composed of two distinctive wall types,” said James Butterfield, RA, design Principal at Perkins Eastman. “One which employs a full-height, vertical perforated metal shading system, and a second which introduces opacified shadowbox panels to minimize the quantity of unshaded vision glass.” Each curtainwall module reaches a height of 30 feet and is anchored at the end of each concrete slab. Aluminum brackets project from the Kawneer-produced wall system and are fastened to the 1/4-inch-thick vertical perforated panels at four points. The overall goal of these devices is the mitigation of solar incidence and internal glare associated with typical large-scale curtain wall design.

New York–based architects Perkins Eastman and engineers Arup have unveiled the latest batch of renderings for San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Plaza.
The updated designs were submitted to city agencies this week in an effort to begin the formal approval process for the renovations envisioned for the plaza and its associated Muni subway station. The extensive renovations come as the city works to perform required Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) upgrades for both facilities, including the addition of an elevator that will connect the street level to the subway platform. Backers for the project also seek to boost the plaza’s function as a memorial to Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official, and to create a new gateway into the city’s Castro neighborhood.
Perkins Eastman was selected in 2016 as part of an international design competition held by Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza (FHMP), the volunteer group with business connections in the neighborhood.
The latest renderings for Harvey Milk Plaza come after a previously-released iteration of the design was met with community opposition. Perkins Eastman revised the plans following four community workshops over the summer.
The initial designs featured red paving and a uni-directional “stramp” (stair-ramp) that crossed the site going toward the west to create an elevated community amphitheater with the subway entrance located below. The new plans have flipped the arrangement by rotating the amphitheater and subway entrance 180 degrees so that they are located at the easternmost corner of the site, where it is expected that foot traffic would be greatest. The center of the plaza is now marked by a new elevator with the western edge of the plaza populated by low-slung benches and a grove of trees.
The plaza bearing Milk’s name was planned before his death and was not named in his honor until 1985—Milk was assassinated in 1978— and according to FHMP, “the public has longed to see [the plaza] transformed into a place that captures [Milk’s] spirit; a place that embodies [Milk’s] passion to bring people together and see that all are treated with dignity and given voice at the tables of influence.”
The plaza redesign is more-or-less the product of community input, Hoodlinereports, a delicate dance the designers and organizers have played with local residents as they seek to win on-the-street approval for the project. The designs, however, are relatively unloved by SanFranciscoChronicle urbanism critic John King, who has lamented that the plaza would weaken the vitality of the district’s street life by pulling pedestrians away from its key attractions. King added that the proposal’s function as a true memorial to Milk’s legacy could better be suited by other means, as well.
King said:

If the desire is to celebrate Milk’s life and legacy, it might be easier to freshen up the current plaza and create an ongoing fund for its maintenance. Then, install plaques or informative artwork along the bridge-like walkway to Collingwood Street, a path that has serenity despite its surroundings.

The design for the proposal is by no means finalized, however. As the bid makes its way through the approval process, changes and new approaches are sure to be recommended. A timeline for final approval and completion of the plaza has not been announced.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has released its final selection of sites for the four borough-based jails that will replace the notorious prison on Rikers Island. At an under-the-radar mayoral press conference yesterday, the city released its 56-page draft plan (available here) which includes the final locations, number of beds, amenities, zoning restrictions, and other materials necessary for the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) to proceed.
The final selection comes eight months after the city tapped Perkins Eastman to analyze and design alternative sites to the centralized Rikers complex. There had been some back-and-forth with the community in each of the four boroughs over where these 1,500-bed jails would be built (Staten Island is sitting this one out). According to the draft plan, the city will move ahead with its backup plan for the Bronx after failing to secure its preferred site adjacent to the Bronx Hall of Justice and will build a 26-story jail on an NYPD-owned tow pound at 320 Concord Avenue. The city will push ahead with plans for a 40-story jail tower in Tribeca at 80 Centre Street, currently home to the Marriage Bureau.
Brooklyn’s proposed jail at 275 Atlantic Avenue, currently the site of the Brooklyn House of Detention, could also be built out up to 40 stories. The Queens location, 126-02 82nd Avenue in Kew Gardens (formerly the Queens House of Detention) would reach up to 29 stories.

As the draft report fleshes out, each new jail will be designed to integrate with the surrounding community and will include ground-level retail and community facilities, and the Bronx location may contain up to 234 residences, including affordable units. Hundreds of new accessory parking spots will be included at each location, and the Queens jail will open their lots up to the public.
As for the jails themselves, the 6,000 beds will accommodate the 5,000 prisoners expected by 2027, when the phase-in of the new facilities will be fully implemented. Rikers's current population has been consistently falling and was pegged at just under 8,500 in May of 2018–the administration and jail reform advocates are hoping to keep slashing away at that number through a combination of bail reform, expedited trial wait times, increased access to legal representation, and reduced incarceration for lower level offenses.
While the move to close Rikers was lauded by politicians and civil rights activists alike, the community in all four locations must still weigh in on the plan before the project can begin the Uniform Land Use Review Procedures (ULURP) process in mid-2019. The city will be holding a series of workshops to solicit feedback before advancing its plan. According to the report, public meetings on the draft report will be held as follows:
Borough of Brooklyn, September 20, 2018, 6:00 PM
P.S. 133 William A. Butler School 610 Baltic Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11217
Borough of Queens, September 26, 2018, 6:00 PM
Queens Borough Hall 120-55 Queens Boulevard, Kew Gardens, N.Y. 11424
Borough of Manhattan, September 27, 2018, 6:00 PM
Manhattan Municipal Building 1 Centre Street, New York, N.Y. 10007
Borough of the Bronx, October 3, 2018, 6:00 PM
Bronx County Courthouse 851 Grand Concourse, Bronx, N.Y. 10451
Design details for each jail are currently sparse, and will likely be forthcoming as the final sites are locked down.

As part of the plan to close Rikers Island by redistributing inmates to smaller jails across four of the five boroughs, the Daily Newsreports that city officials are looking to build a 40-story jail tower at 80 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan.
Perkins Eastman, along with 17 subcontractors, has been tapped to redesign the smaller community-oriented jails in each borough and orient the new developments toward a rehabilitative model. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office had released a list of preferred community-chosen locations in each borough back in February, but ran into opposition with their sites in the Bronx.
Now the plan for the Manhattan location appears to have changed as well, as the city is looking to top the nine-story 80 Centre Street with a jail tower that could contain affordable housing.
The initial location in Manhattan, an expansion of the Manhattan Detention Complex at 125 White Street, was deemed infeasible for the number of inmates that would need to be housed. Rikers currently houses 9,000 inmates, but the city is hoping to cut that number to 5,000 through bail and sentencing reform and distribute the population throughout the new sites.
Closing the jail has been the goal of vocal activists for whom the facility embodies gross abuses of the criminal justice system. Mayor de Blasio has recently come to support the push for closure.
If the jail tower moves forward–80 Centre St. is one of two sites under consideration–the 700,000-square-foot Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building would be gutted and the preserved facade would serve as the tower's base. The granite, art deco building is currently home to the marriage bureau, and was completed in 1930 and designed by William Haugaard; according to the city’s official building description, Haugaard kept the building squat to avoid casting shadows on the nearby courthouses and Foley Square.
The jail’s vertical shape would mean that men and women would need to be separated on different floors, as would the hospital area, outdoor space, recreation areas, and classrooms. AN will follow this story up as more details become available.

After Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration announced that it would be replacing the notorious Rikers Island jail with four smaller sites spread across the city, the city pledged that it would move swiftly to begin the public review process before the end of the year. Now, the rush to actually secure the listed sites has hit a snag as residents and politicians in the Bronx are pushing back against the construction of a jail there.
The move to close Rikers and spread inmates out across the city’s boroughs can only be accomplished by cutting the 9,000-inmate population in half, a target the administration is aiming for through bail and sentencing reform. Perkins Eastman, working with 17 subcontractors, has been tapped to master plan and maximize density at each of the new jails.
By spreading the remaining 5,000 inmates out to local jails, the city wants to cut down on administrative costs and centralize their facilities. But as Crain’sreports, the proposal to build (or reactivating) new jails in dense neighborhoods isn’t going over well.
In the Bronx, the city is angling to build a 25-story facility directly next to the Bronx Hall of Justice, which would put the prospective jail within walking distance of the B, D and 4 subway lines, and the Melrose Metro-North train station.
As Crain’s notes, while the location makes sense for lawyers and those awaiting trial along with their visiting families, the political interests at play could derail building on that plot. One part of the 100,000-square-foot site is owned by the city, while the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York owns the other two plots. As the feud between Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo continues, it has become increasingly likely that the state government would initiate the required land transfer. City Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson has also objected to building the jail in her district since the Hall of Justice is directly across the street from two public schools.
In a bid to speed up the process, all four sites will move through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) together as one project. As the environmental review could take up to four months alone, the city would need to move fast to secure all of their desired sites before the end of the year. If the Hall of Justice doesn’t pan out, the city may fall back on the more politically expedient site it had originally selected; an NYPD-owned tow pound at 320 Concord Avenue.

Although construction has been underway for some time, new renderings have surfaced for Shimoda Design Group's Macy's-topping tower in Downtown Brooklyn. The structure, a 14-story office tower, is slated to rise inside and on top of the three buildings occupied by the department store on Fulton Street. The strip, one of the busiest retail corridors in the city, has been targeted in recent years by investors due to its proximity to prime Brooklyn neighborhoods like Fort Greene, Boreum Hill, and Brooklyn Heights.
Developer Tishman Speyer is calling this 256-foot-tall project the Wheeler. It will bring almost 844,000 square feet of office space to the area, with floorplates in the new building ranging in size from 34,000 square feet to 60,000 square feet. Macy's is staying on as a retail tenant in the bottom four floors, while offices will occupy the other ten stories. Because the four lower floors are an amalgam of different buildings, these volumes will feature 90,000-square-foot floor plates and 16-foot-tall ceilings. The new structure sports a glass curtain wall with angled fenestrations, and outside, the setbacks and the roof will be crowned with 11 terraces, YIMBYreported. Perkins Eastman as the architect of record.
If all goes according to plan, the Commercial Observernoted the project is expected to be complete by the middle of next year.

Clark Construction Group, the general contractor responsible for realizing the $2.5 billion The Wharf in Washington, D.C., is suing project architect Perkins Eastman over claims of seriously flawed design documents. As first reported by Bisnow, the contractors are seeking $5 million in damages after the recent completion of the project’s first phase, claiming that issues and omissions in the drawings necessitated numerous on-site fixes.
The Wharf, a massive mixed-use development spread across a mile-long stretch of D.C.'s southwestern (and formerly industrial) waterfront, opened the doors of its first phase back in October of last year. After completely replacing the existing seawall and promenade, 1.2 million square feet of office space, hotel rooms, retail, luxury and affordable residential units, a marina, and waterfront parks rose on the Perkins Eastman-master planned site. A two-story underground parking garage also runs the length of the development. When complete, The Wharf will encompass 3.2 million square feet in total.
According to the complaint levied by Clark Construction, Perkins Eastman either submitted incorrect details in their design documents or omitted portions of their drawings and failed to respond to inquiries in a timely fashion. The suit alleges that the architects misplaced structural columns, designed exterior retail doors that were unable to open, placed concrete beams too low to achieve the correct clearance, and made mistakes in coordination that resulted in slabs being too thick to install already-purchased doors. Even the coordination of structural rebar and foundation piles are cited as having contained significant errors, and Clark Construction claims they were forced to take on material losses as the result of correcting the defects in the field.
Clark Construction is suing for a breach of written contract, professional negligence, and negligent misrepresentation as a result.
Because of the project’s tight timeline, “The errors and omissions complained of herein did not arise and were not known, knowable, discovered, discoverable, appreciated, or appreciable until various points within the past three years,” the lawsuit claims. “It remains possible and likely that errors and omissions will continue to arise and become known, discovered, and appreciated in the future as discovery in this matter proceeds including, without limitation, expert discovery.”
The second phase of The Wharf is scheduled to break ground later this year, and finish construction in 2022. Perkins Eastman declined to comment.

Only two weeks after New York City announced that Perkins Eastman would be studying potential locations and designs for the borough-based jails that will eventually replace Rikers Island, the Mayor’s office has released a list of the chosen, community-based sites. These four smaller jails will ultimately provide space for 5,000 inmates, and are spread out across three existing Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities and one new location in the Bronx.
The four chosen sites are as follows:
Manhattan Detention Center, 125 White Street, Manhattan, 10013
Brooklyn Detention Center, 275 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, 11201
Queens Detention Center, 126-01 82nd Avenue, Kew Gardens, 11415
NYPD Tow Pound, 320 Concord Avenue, Bronx, 10454
The decision is as a joint agreement between Mayor Bill de Blasio, Speaker Corey Johnson, and City Council Members from each of the relevant boroughs. As part of the arrangement, all four sites will undergo the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), the public review process, as a single project instead of individually. The city will simultaneously solicit public input and conduct an environmental impact statement (EIS) to speed the ULURP process along.
“This agreement marks a huge step forward on our path to closing Rikers Island,” said Mayor de Blasio in a press release sent to AN. “In partnership with the City Council, we can now move ahead with creating a borough-based jail system that’s smaller, safer and fairer. I want to thank these representatives, who share our vision of a more rehabilitative and humane criminal justice system that brings staff and detainees closer to their communities.”
Of note is the establishment of a permanent jail in the Bronx, which as of writing is serviced by “the Boat,” a jail on the barge in the East River, and the reopening of the Kew Gardens detention center which closed in 2002.
The plan to renovate and reorient these jails towards a rehabilitative model will be spearheaded by Perkins Eastman and its 17 subcontractors. Besides masterplanning the sites, Perkins Eastman will also be responsible for maximizing density at each of jail. This movement of inmates off of Rikers will be accompanied by a suite of intake, bail, mental health and re-entry reforms targeted at reducing the overall amount of inmates.
Mayor de Blasio’s announcement comes, maybe not coincidentally, immediately after the state level Commission of Correction released a scathing 70-page report on the condition of Rikers Island. The commission, which has delivered its findings to Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature, has labeled Rikers as one of five “worst offenders” in the state, and details inmate deaths, escape attempts, fires, and conditions that are “unsecure, unsanitary and dangerous, for staff and inmates alike.” Although the city has committed itself to closing Rikers Island within ten years, the state may take action as a result of this report to close the jail sooner. The full report is available here.

New York City has tapped Perkins Eastman to study the design and location of new city jails to replace Rikers Island, the detention facility that's slated for shutdown over the next decade.
The ten-month, almost $7.6 million contract asks the New York firm to study three existing jails in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. The architects will look at sites for new detention facilities, especially in the Bronx, where the borough's main facility is "the Boat," a jail on the barge in the East River.
Perkins Eastman selected 17 subcontractors to assist with the project, including Atelier Ten, WSP (formerly WSP | Parsons Brinkerhoff), W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, and RicciGreene Associates, a New York firm that specializes in jails. Community engagement consultants Fitzgerald & Halliday andthe Osborne Association, a nonprofit that serves justice-involved individuals, are the only non-engineering, architecture, real estate development, or planning firms on the list. Along with these collaborators and the city, Perkins Eastman will reach out to neighborhood groups, study the environmental impact of the jails, and ideate on designs. This will be the firm's first detention facilities project.
"The physical expressions of what jails look like, where they’re located, and what happens inside of them will determine what kind of system we’ll have, and it’s critical that we’re thinking about jails not as places that are far away on islands and hard to get to, but as part of the ebb and flow of a neighborhood," said Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, in a prepared statement.
The borough-based facilities will be integrated with their neighborhoods, in contrast to Rikers, and they will be designed to accommodate education, vocational, health, and re-entry services to inmates. At the end of the study, which is officially the pre-schematic design services for a forthcoming citywide jail services master plan, the team is expected to produce three conceptual designs, complete with plans, sections, elevations, and renderings, along with cost estimates.
Last November, the city issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the study, and Perkins Eastman was selected from four eligible respondents. Although the Department of Correction (DOC) is the lead agency on this study, the RFP was initiated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), the Department of Design and Construction (DDC), and the DOC.
The news comes as the Rikers shutdown, announced last year, begins in earnest. In early January the city announced it will be closing the first of ten jails on the island this summer. Right now, there are about 8,700 people in jails citywide, but the city says it needs less than 5,000 inmates to close Rikers for good.
Perkins Eastman Spokesperson Amber Zilemba confirmed that work should begin shortly.
[H/T The Wall Street Journal]

A design team led by Perkins Eastman and Arup has been selected to redesign Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood. The team’s proposal beat out bids from Groundworks Office and Kuth | Ranieri Architects for the project, which is being organized by Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza and the American Institute of Architects San Francisco Chapter (AIASF).The Perkins Eastman scheme envisions filling in most of the existing plaza, which exists in a sunken configuration connecting city streets to the MUNI Castro Station subway stop via a descending, landscaped ramp topped by a sidewalk bridge. Instead of that arrangement, the proposed redesign will envision the plaza in a somewhat more traditional sense: Broad city sidewalks will cover the subway station entirely, with an access portal to the transit stop capped by a stepped amphitheater and open-air community room. The concept for the stepped ramp is billed as a “soapbox for many” and is a nod to Harvey Milk’s use of the site as a protest space where the activist and eventual San Francisco Supervisor would stand on a soapbox and give political speeches. The deck-clad steps will be accessible via an American with Disabilities Act–compliant stair-ramp.Perkins Eastman associate McCall Wood—one of the leaders of the design team along with associate Justin Skoda—said in a press release announcing the team’s selection, “Through his spirit and work [Milk] ignited a political awakening in the LGBTQ community. In order to best honor his memory, our goal was to create a place for the community, a place for people to be themselves and build solidarity. The hope is that visitors will be inspired to take up the mantle of Milk’s unfinished work and continue to fight for civil rights.”The plaza is the epicenter of an annual candlelight march commemorating the life of Harvey Milk, an aspect the winning team has integrated into the lighting scheme for the space. The plaza itself and the sidewalks surrounding the intersection of Market and 17th Streets will be populated by many vertical light elements designed to resemble candles, with each of the lamps to be dedicated to donors who contribute funding toward the project.The sidewalk cap will create a series of underground spaces that include storage rooms, a bathroom, a reception area, as well as a community room. These spaces will open up into the redesigned MUNI station, which will feature rainbow-patterned lighting schemes as well as didactic installations showcasing the life and accomplishments of Milk’s political career. A timeline for the project has not been announced. See the competition website for more information.

The Wharf–a $2 billion new development on a former industrial stretch of the D.C. waterfront–has finally opened. The developers are Madison Marquette and PN Hoffman, and the master architect and planner is Perkins Eastman.
Previously the site was a mile-long stretch of boat storage, industrial space, and some back-door barbecue joints. At its northern end, it also includes the oldest fish market in the United States. Before the Wharf could be built, the existing seawall and promenade were torn up and replaced by an underground, two-story parking garage spanning the length of the development. The garages connect from below into an array of luxury residential structures with ground-level commercial space–restaurants, yoga studios, and other amenities. Last week all of these opened to the public–in total, 1.2 million square feet of mixed-use space including office structures, luxury and affordable residential space, a marina, and waterfront parks. The fish market was the only structure preserved as-is.
The Anthem, a new 6,000-person theatre venue, is a cornerstone development of the Wharf. Designed by New York-based Rockwell Group, the venue is essentially a concrete volume hedged in by two L-shaped residential structures. The Anthem has a warehouse-like interior and two levels of balconies split into smaller, drawer-like extrusions. Massive steel panels flank the stage, laser cut and illuminated with the pattern of two enormous curtains drawn back, resembling the velvet drapery of Baroque theaters.
The space is managed by a 30-year old staple organization in D.C. entertainment–the 9:30 Club–to whom the Wharf reached out in the initial stages. The building’s board-form concrete paneling and industrial facade are intended as a nod to the Club’s famed punk-laden lineups. In the lobby, one can look up through an installation of floating cymbals to four rectangular skylights three floors up. If you look closely, the skylights ripple with water–the underbelly of a pool for a residential structure stacked above.
A key design challenge for the Anthem was its siting between two residential structures. To address the noise issue, Rockwell spent several million dollars designing a multi-layered sound barrier between the structures, which are reportedly so effective that amplified concerts are inaudible from the interiors of apartments less than a hundred feet away. Supposedly, a resident could sleep soundly while Dave Grohl shredded away on opening night.
The Anthem's neighboring structures include designs by FOX Architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox, Perkins Eastman, Parcel 3A, Cunningham Quill Architects, BBG_BBGM, Handel Architects, WDG Architecture, Studio MB, SmithGroup JJR, MTFA Architecture, SK&I, and Moffatt & Nichol.
Only Phase One has opened. Phase Two will add an additional 1.2 million square feet to the overall site footprint, mostly extending south. The roster of new structures will include designs by firms such as SHoP Architects, Rafael Viñoly, Morris Adjmi Architects, Hollwich Kushner (HWKN), ODA, WDG Architecture, and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). The expansion will include increased office and residential space, an additional pier and marina, as well as increased park space. Phase One is notably without much public greenery. The construction of Phase Two is slated to begin in 2018, with a projected opening of 2021.

The Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza and the American Institute of Architects San Francisco Chapter (AIASF) recently announced their selection of three competing proposals led by Groundworks Office, Kuth | Ranieri Architects, and Perkins Eastman to re-design Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco. The proposals were selected from responses to a public competition aimed at re-working the aging public space. According to a statement by the Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza, designs for the current plaza—a sunken brick- and concrete-lined stepped promenade with integrated seating sitting above the Castro Station subway stop—“fall short of being an inspiration for hope, change, and equality” in the neighborhood. Organizers of the competition seek to remake the plaza into an uplifting and accessible public gathering space by covering the below-ground portions with a new street-level plaza that can be used as a site of protest, celebration, and commemoration. The three finalist schemes posit various approaches for programming new ground-level areas as well as for how to integrate the plaza into the surrounding neighborhood. The existing plaza is punctuated by a large flag pole topped by a rainbow flag, which will remain after renovations.Kuth | Ranieri–led proposalKuth | Ranieri’s proposal seeks to create a “living memorial and [neighborhood] destination” that functions as an “active and iconic space” symbolizing the national LGBT civil rights movement Milk ignited, according to a statement. The scheme utilizes brightly-colored glass-clad archways to highlight important nodes in the plaza, including the new subway entrance, a bus stop, and a new elevator. The glass panel structures are printed with scenes depicting scenes from Milk’s life in order to create an “integrated experiential memorial.” Down below the street level in the subway ticketing area, the glass panels frame a triangular skylight made from pink glass that will light the space from above.
Kuth | Ranieri is joined on the team by RHAA Landscape Architecture and Planning and Catherine Wagner Studio.
Perkins Eastman–led proposal
The plaza was once used by Milk to give soapbox speeches—a fact the Perkins Eastman team interpreted in their scheme, which calls for topping the subway stop with a stepped-ramp amphitheater that can act as a“soapbox for many.” The structure would be punctuated by an elevator connecting the subway stop and the sidewalk. It would also be sandwiched between two bands of sidewalk that lead to a flat plaza at the corner. The southwestern end of the plaza would contain a grand entrance to the subway station capped by the highest end of the amphitheater. The scheme would also be populated by a multitude of street lights designed to symbolize the candlesticks used in the protest march commemorating Milk’s legacy that emanates from the plaza every year.
The project team includes Arup as structural engineer, Propp + Guerin as graphic designer, Lightswitch SF, Inc. as lighting designer, and artist Cybele Lyle.
Groundworks Office–led proposal
Lastly, the Groundworks Office–led proposal calls for populating the new open plaza with a series of low, faceted masses containing integrated seating, a memorial wall, and a glass canopy for the subway entrance and bus stop along Market Street. The scheme is geared toward creating a “unified plaza that simplifies circulation to public transit” while also streamlining pedestrian routes between transit lines and along surrounding streets.
The three proposals are undergoing a period of public comment until September 21st. To share input on the proposals, visit the competition website.